


Saints and Monsters

by Fluffysminion



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Azure Wanderer, Mustation Stage: Five
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-07
Updated: 2019-10-07
Packaged: 2020-11-27 01:22:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 952
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20939948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fluffysminion/pseuds/Fluffysminion
Summary: Jaspar considers the deep moral dilema: Are saints for eating?





	Saints and Monsters

The ornate vaulted ceiling hangs high overhead, and the filigreed walls stand far enough apart that there is a dark stripe down the middle of the room where the candlelight doesn’t reach. It is along this stripe that Jaspar creeps, though there is more than enough space for him to stand he crawls with his chest against the floor. The space is too big, too open. And he knows he isn’t welcome here.

The air is heavy with incense and the drifting smoke from hundreds of candles, and the religious imagery is even more obnoxiously omnipresent than elsewhere on the vessel. It is a holy place, more of a shrine than a treasure room. Not a place for a mutant like him. Paranoid Jaspar turned to look back, but there was only the trail of foot and hand prints his bare feet and sweaty palms had left on the newly polished floor. There was nothing he could do about that, as there was nothing he could do about his distinctive smell. Though he wants to be respectful, he is painfully aware that his existence, let alone his presence in a place of worship, is an afront to what it all stands for.

So he cringes onward, sticking to the shadows, trying not to look up at the candle covered caskets. But though he had been dammed for many sins, curiosity had always been foremost among them. And with no evidence that he has yet been noticed he judges it probably safe to sneak a look at what it is that’s so important it needs to be protected from thieves as well as being worshiped. 

Stepping into the candlelight, still on all fours because the display was at human height, Jaspar fixed his attention on the display cabinet closest to him, trying hard not to look at the vast empty space either side of him. The display is so gaudy and ostentatious, with the foil icons, the bejewelled casket, and the candles and other offerings, that he almost laughs at how unimpressive and mundane the contents are. All this for some bones. Old dry ones at that.

The next casket is a bit more impressive, containing most of a skeleton. Still dried out but most of the bones are intact, and Jaspar finds himself salivating at the thought that some of them may still contain marrow. The one after that has mummified hands, and is surrounded by paintings of a woman offering her wrists to a figure of golden light. It is only then that he makes the connection between the icons and the caskets. This is a reliquary, and those were the bones of a saint he was just considering eating. He turns away, sickened.

And sees the trail of prints he has left on the otherwise pristine floor. His sweat, his mutant smell, he is defiling this place just by passing through. He wonders if the saints looking down upon him from the walls would forgive him. He wonders if he should be forgiven, given what he has become. At one point this room would have awed him, and he would have fallen to his knees to give thanks for being in a place so holy, and maybe even believed that it would change his luck. But while he had not fallen so far that the holy symbols burnt him, now they were just that, symbols of another hostile power that would destroy him were he to draw too much attention. And now the caskets contained not holy relics that blessed those who looked upon them, but old bones of people too dead to care what happened to them. Food that he wouldn’t have to kill for.

He'd never liked the killing part, the screaming and the blood, though he had to admit he loved the taste of it he certainly did not enjoy the way it got all over everything. It wouldn’t hurt anyone if he were to take a few bones, someone might lose some money but what was that compared to the life he would have to take if he obtained his food the usual way? Surely it was better to eat the dead, even if they were important dead, than to inflict new harm upon the living.

He turned back to the case. The hands were still there, still dry and dead. He wiped the saliva off his face, whatever he decided to do about the relics themselves there was no excuse for ruining the artworks by carelessly drooling on them. He leaned over the case, no obvious locks or other mechanisms. If he so choose he might be able to just open the thing and take them. But he hesitated.

The thing reflected in the glass looked more like a demon than the human he remembered being. A beast with horns and fangs looming over something valued and holy with ill intent. That wasn’t what he wanted to be. That wasn’t him. He fell to his knees, clutching his head in his hands. The gulf between who he had been and what he had become was so wide, and he had lost so much. Stealing holy relics would have been unthinkable to that person. He’d be horrified by the wretched mutant that now carried his soul.

Jaspar wept. On his knees before a saint he had no name for he cried for his lost humanity, for the lives he had taken, the crimes committed, and for the person he had forgotten how to be. As he wept he realised that if there was nothing to stop him getting in to the relics, that meant that their defences would be the type that stopped thieves getting out.

**Author's Note:**

> He was probabably corralled in there on purpose, but hey, let me out or I'll eat your saints seems like a pretty good argument for not keeping him trapped there long.


End file.
